Coober Pedy, South Australia: Why are there underground houses?

The underground houses in Coober Pedy make for consistent, tolerable temperatures when it’s obscenely hot outside in outback South Australia. The opal miners who live in Coober Pedy live underground because it’s more pleasant.

The walls of the room in the Desert Cave Hotel look like they’ve been splattered in blood. There are no windows to allow natural light in. Elsewhere, this would be grim. In the South Australian outback town of Coober Pedy, this is all perfectly normal.

The hotel room is underground, dug out into the side of a hill. The blood red streaks are part of the area’s striking natural sandstone.

It’s not the red part of the sandstone that interests most people here, however. 90% of the world’s opal comes from in and around Coober Pedy, Australia’s underground town.

Coober Pedy opal mining

And that’s what brings people to this inhospitable part of the South Australian desert. The first opal was found by a 14-year-old boy in 1915. Since then miners have flocked from all over the world.

This has led to an unexpectedly bizarrely cosmopolitan community in the middle of the South Australian outback. Around 45 nationalities are present in and around Coober Pedy. They have brought with them Chinese restaurants, Greek cafés and Italian clubs.

There’s also an underground Serbian orthodox church,. This, as 80% of homes in Australia’s underground town are, is tunnelled out of the earth.

To understand the subterranean mentality in Coober Pedy, you need to look at what’s above the ground. The landscape here, way north of Goyder’s Line, is staggeringly stark. Salmon pink dust coats the horizon. Rubble heaps from the opal mines are the major landmarks.

This is attractive to Hollywood movie makers wanting a post-apocalyptic hellhole or harsh alien planet. Mad Max 3 and Pitch Black are on the list the films shot in Coober Pedy. But it’s not an obviously enticing place to live.  

Coober Pedy underground houses

Winter nights in Coober Pedy can be bitterly cold. But the days can be horrifically hot, with temperatures in the high forties Celsius. Throw in the dust, and it’s no surprise that of Coober Pedy’s 4,000 residents prefer to live in underground homes. Most have the mining equipment to dig such underground houses out, and the subterranean temperatures are a reliable 20 to 25 degrees Celsius.

Some of these underground houses are visitable, including Faye’s Historic Underground Home.

This outback abode is unexpectedly lavish. The upstairs section has an indoor swimming pool, while a chain of bedrooms slinks further underground. A (never-used) fireplace is fashioned out of semi-precious jasper stone.

Coober Pedy on a Stuart Highway road trip

It takes a special type of character to live in the desert furnace of Coober Pedy. But it’s arguably the highlight of the South Australian stretch of the Stuart Highway. Visitors can also go into mine, rummage in rubble heaps for opals and browse Aboriginal art galleries. To come to Australia just to visit Coober Pedy would be insane, but the town is a must-see if taking on the long desert drive from Adelaide to Alice Springs in the Northern Territory.

It’s a long drive from Adelaide to Coober Pedy, though – South Australia is big, and Coober Pedy is 849km north of Adelaide. You might as well stop for Rieslings in the Clare Valley wine region on the way. Or maybe discover the secretive military history of Woomera and take a picture by the Lake Hart salt lake. Driving times to Coober Pedy are huge from any direction – it’s a 688km drive from Coober Pedy to Alice Springs, for example.

More weird mining towns

If you’ve got a bizarre fetish for mining towns, then you might want to try Kalgoorlie in Western Australia. The Museum of the Goldfields goes into gold mining past and present. It’s also possible to go on an opal mine tour in White Cliffs, New South Wales.

More South Australian outback adventures

Whale-watching at Head of Bight

Stop at Mambray Creek on the drive from Adelaide to Whyalla.

Military secrets in Woomera

Swimming with sea lions at Baird Bay